Robots and Empire

Cranking through the SF novels of the good Doctor Asimov.
I think this one's my favorite, at least so far. The action/talk
ratio is (for Asimov) pretty high; things actually happen, including
a thrilling climax. And
the characters seem
(again, for Asimov) to be a little less one-dimensional.

The book is set a couple centuries after the events of The Robots of
Dawn. The effort Elijah Baley set in motion in that book
is in progress: after centuries of isolation, Earth is sending out
"Settlers" to expand into the Galaxy. This is met with some resistance
from the culprits in the previous book. They want to shut down Earth's
expansion and leave the Galaxy for the "Spacers", the original
colonists.

Worse, Elijah, being a Terran, has passed away. (He shows up in a
flashback, though.) But the robots are still around: R. Daneel Olivaw
and his de facto new partner, Giskard. Their task is to protect their
mistress, Gladia, as she embarks on a mission to find out why all the
humans
have vanished from her old home world of Solaria. What they discover
turns out to (of course) have galactic repercussions. Daneel and Giskard
find themselves on dangerous ground, not only from human enemies,
but also from the limitations of Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics.

Oh yeah: the book was written in 1985, and the closing scene
is set up in such a way that it vitally depends on the hysterical
reaction to (without
spoilers) a notable event of the late 70s. Asimov clearly throught
that event would have much more importance in the near future than
it actually turned out to have. This doesn't ruin the book, fortunately,
but Asimov was a far better storyteller than prognosticator.

Premium Rush

OK, so this is probably a silly, formulaic action flick.
Still, I liked it.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays "Wilee", one of Manhattan's anarchic
horde of bicycle messengers. Once on trajectory to become
a respectable lawyer, he prefers the risky, adrenaline-soaked
career of dodging vehicles and pedestrians to get packages to
their destinations.

That could have been the premise
of a small character-study movie. The heck with that, because
this is a chase movie, full of gimmicks and gags.

The MacGuffin is a small slip of paper that Wilee is hired to
transport from Columbia down to Chinatown. Wilee immediately
finds himself targeted by a dirty, violence-prone cop. (He's
also targeted by a clean cop for his borderline-insane
flouting of traffic law.)
Flashbacks (eventually) uncover the motives behind everyone
doing what they're doing; there's heavy involvement
of the Chinese underworld. But what really matters is the
chase and the stunts.

This worked for me because Joseph Gordon-Levitt manages to infuse
his character with a likeable pluck. The dirty cop, played
by Michael Shannon, is also quite watchable and gets some
good lines. (Amusing to a onetime science fiction geek:
when providing a fake name,
he uses "Forrest J.
Ackerman", a sainted figure in
science-fiction fandom.)

This is one of the
rare movies that I wouldn't have minded seeing one of those
making-of documentaries, because (a) that really does appear
to be Mr. Gordon-Levitt taking totally insane high-speed risks
with only a bike helmet for protection; and (b) it's all
played out in Manhattan traffic that also appears unstaged.
How did they do that?

Arbitrage

Two questions:

is there any actual "arbitrage" going on in this
movie? Even in a metaphorical sense? Maybe I should ask Tyler Cowen.
Otherwise, I entertain the possibility that the moviemakers
simply rummaged around the financial press
for a random financial term. "Margin Call?" "Taken."
"Leverage?"
"Taken."
"Arbitrage?" "Well, OK."

The movie stars charismatic, handsome, Richard Gere in the main role;
his antagonist is scruffy, unglamourous, schlub Tim Roth.
Does this movie work very differently if the roles are switched?

Anyway: Gere plays Robert Miller, the (as previously said)
charismatic, handsome, and (above all) rich manager of a hedge fund.
Outwardly, it's all good: corporate jets and limousines at his
beck and call, a loving family (with Susan Sarandon—woo hoo—
as his wife).

But just slightly underneath the superficial exterior, it's
all falling apart. Miller has made a very bad, very illegal, hedged bet
on a copper mine in Unstablestan. With Other People's Money. (Also
taken.) And he has
a mistress on the side, a cokehead French artist. Then things get
much worse, and he finds he's got to deal with the (previously
mentioned) scruffy, unglamourous Tim Roth. Undeniably guilty of
multiple crimes, the question is: can he escape jail and a ridiculous
amount of bad publicity?

Men in Black 3

With Christmas and its preparation over, and with nothin' but reruns on
the tube, it's time to plow through the Netflix disks. This
is—OK—probably a cold-blooded attempt to squeeze out
another few dollars out of a beloved movie, but it's (at least)
watchable.

The villain here, intent on (what else) the destruction of Earth,
is "Boris the Animal", played by an unrecognizable Jemaine Clement.
(Really unrecognizable: I've seen every episode of Flight of the
Conchords and I didn't realize it was him until the credits rolled.)
Boris escapes from the lunar prison where Agent K (Tommy Lee Jones)
placed him back in
1969, and comes up with a devious plot to undo that history via time
travel. Suddenly Agent K is gone in the "present"; only Agent J (Will
Smith) remembers him. And the protection K wangled back in 1969
is absent, leaving Earth in peril from Boris's species. So
J must travel back in time to untangle the time stream.

And so he does (spoiler, sorry). But it's an awful lot of fun
along the way. J meets up with the younger K (Josh Brolin does
an uncanny Tommy Lee Jones impression) and navigates the late
sixties with aplomb.

URLs du Jour

2012-12-28

Libertarian site Free
Keene quotes a Blue
Hampshire post in its entirety. It's by Cynthia L. Chase, one of
Keene's representatives to the New Hampshire General Court. The
title is "Free Staters Unwelcome Here". Where "here" is the state
whose motto is "Live Free or Die".

It's an amazingly perfect storm of snooty arrogance and name-calling;
well worth your attention if you're interested in a window into
how these people think.
The thesis is: keep those foul immigrants inspired by the Free State Project out of New
Hampshire. They are, Cynthia says, New Hampshire's " single biggest
threat" Eek!

How to keep them out? Well, mostly by being rude
to them. Cynthia relates
an example:

Here in Keene we had a couple show up on Central Square to take part in
our weekly Saturday morning peace demonstration. In the course of the
conversation they allowed that they were Free Staters considering moving
to Keene. The folks on the Square told them in no uncertain terms not to
do that because Free Staters are not welcome here. Cheshire County is a
welcoming community but not to those whose stated goal is to move in
enough ideologues to steal our state, and our way of life.

As a point of reference:
the FSP chose New Hampshire for its participants to
move to back in 2003. Cynthia Chase has only lived in New Hampshire
since
2006.

Now:
I've only lived in New Hampshire since 1981, and sometimes still feel
like a n00b. I don't know if I'll ever live here long enough
to exhibit Cynthia's imperiousness in declaring how hostile "our state"
should be to people who disagree with me politically.

Among those Cynthia would probably consider one of those nasty Free
Staters is
P.J.
O'Rourke, who has content in the WSJ today, providing
advice (certainly a fruitless task) to President Obama.

Mr. President, your entire campaign platform was redistribution. Take
from the rich and give to the . . . Well, actually, you didn't mention
the poor. What you talked and talked about was the middle class,
something most well-off Americans consider themselves to be members of.
So your plan is to take from the more rich and the more or less rich and
give to the less rich, more or less. It is as if Robin Hood stole
treasure from the Sheriff of Nottingham and bestowed it on the Deputy
Sheriff.

Read the who… oh, you've already clicked over.

Another Pun Salad fave, Kevin D. Williamson, has a good
article
rebutting a softhead on the gun issue. He speaks the truth about the
Second Amendment that will make nearly all Democrats (and not a few
Republicans) squirm:

The Second Amendment is not about Bambi and burglars -- whatever a
well-regulated militia is, it is not a hunting party or a sport-clays
club. It is remarkable to me that any educated person -- let alone a
Harvard Law graduate -- believes that the second item on the Bill of
Rights is a constitutional guarantee of enjoying a recreational
activity.

Arthur Chrismas

Netflix sent us this DVD about a month ago, and we patiently saved
it up for Christmas… and then other things ran a bit too late
for us to watch it on Christmas. Oops! We probably deprived a
poor household with actual children from watching it. Somewhere
in Farmington, harried parents probably put in a copy
of Reservoir Dogs for the kiddos instead.

But we finally saw it the day after Christmas, and that's
close enough.

It starts out describing how Santa does things these days: very
high-tech, assisted with a horde of elves, and a superfast stealth
craft that's more flying saucer than sleigh. The old sleigh and the
reindeer have been relegated to a forgotten corner of Santa's
North Pole base.

The organization up there is vaguely monarchical, with
the title of Santa being passed down from generation to generation.
The current Santa is tiring after 70 Christmases; his heir apparent
is the no-nonsense Steve Christmas, who's driven the big technological
makeover of the operation and runs it like a martinet.
His younger brother, Arthur, is a bumbler, earnest believer in the
Christmas spirit, and (like the sleigh and reindeer) has been shuffled
off to a obscure office, answering kids' letters to Santa.

But this year, a bike destined for Gwen, a little English Girl,
somehow got mislaid. Big-picture guy
Steve notes this as unfortunate, but acceptable. Santa, tired,
meekly agrees and settles in for a long winter's nap.

Arthur, however, views this as not at all acceptable; aided by
136-year-old (and slightly demented)
GrandSanta, and wrapping elf Briony, they set off
in the old sleigh with Gwen's bike. Hijinks ensue.

This is made by many of the same folks that did the wonderful
The Pirates! Band of
Misfits, although it's not quite as wonderful. Rated PG for "some
mild rude humor", it's a good choice for family viewing.

And (last but not least), beef jerky from McKinnons
Market and a couple biiig bottles of beer from local Throwback Brewery.
Specifically: "Hog Happy Hefeweizen" and "Dippity Do American Brown".
Now all I need is a football game on TV;
I understand there are some coming
up.

I have very generous friends and family.

I didn't have anything sensible to say about
the Newtown CT horror. If you want cheap strident emotionalism
it's easy enough to find
elsewhere. The folks who brought you the phrase
"You never want a
serious crisis to go to waste" are busy at work trying to
push through "gun control" legislation in the heat of the moment.

The FDA calls certain substances "controlled." But there are no
"controlled substances," there are only controlled citizens.

So it is with "gun control"; the aim is not to control guns, but
to control citizens.

That's the primary goal
of your average 21st Century
American Progressive, and they'll use any pretext—including
your understandable reaction to murdered children—to get it.

Wayne LaPierre, the head of the National Rifle Association, was
apparently taken with the "we gotta do something" disease,
and went on-air with advocacy of "armed security" of "every single
school in America". The response of Cato's Gene Healy
deserves your attention. Bottom line: top-down "solutions" conjured
up out of panic and fear will inevitably lead to misallocations
of scarce resources that will leave us all, including the kiddos,
less safe.

Is that irony? I can never tell.

But enough seriousness: there's a nice little story from
Walter Mosley in the December Atlantic magazine,
and the folks there have put it online: "Reply to a Dead
Man".

I'm a huge fan of the FX network series
Justified, a potent combination of wonderful
acting, plotting, mordant humor, shocking violence,
and bad language. Among the supporting talents is Nick Searcy,
who plays Art Mullen. As we await new episodes coming up in
a few weeks, you could do worse than take a few video lessons
from Nick Searcy's Acting School.

Nick also did this unconventional ad for… well, let's
leave it as a surprise. Check it
out:

Dead of Night

It's been a while since my last Randy Wayne White novel, featuring
his hero Marion "Doc" Ford, fulltime biology geek, part-time deadly
secret agent. This is the twelfth entry in the series that (as I type)
has 19 novels. And it's good!

The plot driver here is an attempt at bioterrorism aimed at Doc's
beloved state of Florida. A crackpot/hustler environmentalist
has latched onto hordes of dangerous species, and knows enough
about the Floridian ecosystem to deploy them to his maximum financial
benefit; he's aided by a raft of flunkies, including a deadly
female Chechen ex-soldier, who's kinda into sadistic killing.

Doc gets roped into all this doing a favor for a friend: would you look into
what my brilliant Asperger's-syndrome brother is up to? Doc finds him being
tortured by the bad guys. I hate it when that happens.
He gives futile chase, and returns only to find the brother has
committed suicide, and his corpse is riddled with disgusting parasites.
Who could blame him?

I find Mr. White's novels to be extremely easy reads, and they're just
getting better as the series continues.

MLK Day 2013: UNH Tones Down the Politics

It's that time of year when Pun Salad looks at the upcoming
"celebration" of Martin
Luther King Day at the University Near Here. I'm somewhat surprised
to discover a change for the better. What happened?

More on that below. First, the obligatory "some things don't change"
part:

MLK Day is the only holiday for which UNH engineers a multi-day shindig
with guest speakers and sponsored events.

It wouldn't be kosher to do it on the actual MLK day on
January 21; Spring Semester classes don't start until January 22,
and what's the point of doing this if the students aren't around?
So the events are scheduled to start the following week, from January 27
until February 5.

UNH publicizes a "Spiritual Celebration" service to be held at the
Durham Community Church. MLK Day is a day on which the Wall of
Separation is temporarily lowered, where the University advocates you
show up at a church for "songs, drumming, music, poetry, and special
readings". It
allows the participants to obtain that warm-n-fuzzy moral superiority
buzz without getting bogged down in all that tacky, inconvenient God and
Bible stuff.

Here's where things are slightly better this year: it used to be that
the tone of the MLK celebration at UNH was in-your-face leftism. This
year…not quite as much! The keynote speaker is Rob Dixon, UNH class of
1983. Mr. Dixon came to UNH on a basketball scholarship, and is one
of the team's top scorers ever. He didn't get to play in the NBA, but
played professionally in Europe. He went on to teach and coach, and
nowadays is is the founder and Executive Director of Project
RISE, devoted to providing remedial education to "academically high
risk" students in the Boston Public School system.

In short, Mr. Dixon is actively involved in trying to teach black kids
who need help.
Search as I might, I can't find even a hint of the strident
leftism that's been the norm in past MLK day speakers.
And he has an actual strong tie to UNH, not just parachuting in
for the day.

So good for UNH; I don't get to say that enough. He's not my dream
MLK Day speaker (Clarence Thomas, Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams,
Herman Cain, Tim Scott, …) but a decided positive break from
UNH's tedious ideological tradition.

Not to say that things are perfect. The program for MLK
day is the usual thoughtless word-stuffed
gasbaggery. For example, the description of the
previously-mentioned "MLK Spiritual Celebration: Rise Up into
Communities of Justice and Compassion" at Durham Community Church:

Join the UNH and Durham communities in an inter-faith and multi-faith
spiritual celebration that supports and highlights the spiritual
foundation that Martin Luther King Jr. brought to his life and works.
Featuring songs, drumming, music, poetry, and special readings, the
community remembers The Rev. Dr King. Reception to follow. All are
welcomed to this moving and joyous evening!

For prose like this,
the rules are: (1) don't use just one word when you can stick in a few
more; (2) don't worry at all about it meaning anything specific.

So: not just "justice" but "justice and compassion".

And
there are "communities" of each. Or maybe both. Whatever.

And you don't do anything as mundane as joining these
"communities". You "rise up into" them. Which is, I'm sure, a
different process.

But if you get past that, you get to ponder the nature of the "spiritual
celebration": it's "inter-faith" and "multi-faith". Are those
different concepts? If so, how will the "celebration" be split between
them? Maybe the music and drumming will be inter-faith, while the poetry
and readings will be multi-faith? There will be a test afterwards to see
if you figured it out.

The "spiritual celebration" has something to do with a "spiritual
foundation". What? Well it "supports and highlights" it.

How do you "support" a foundation? Isn't a foundation something that
supports things on its own?

Worse, we read that this is a foundation that Martin Luther King, Jr.
"brought to" his life and works. Does that metaphor work for you?
Me neither. You don't "bring" a foundation anywhere.
You build a foundation, and then you build on a foundation.

Geez, I hate it when I spend ten times more mental work reading a short bit of
prose that the author spent writing it.

Some notes about the MLK "quote" emblazoned at the top of the program:

Everybody can be great . . . because anybody can serve.

The page claims this to be a quote from King's 1968 sermon "The Drum
Major Instinct". It turns out to be a popular misquotation. It
should be:

Everybody can be great . . . because everybody can serve.

Yes, I verified it by listening to the audio.
It even makes more sense that way. Fun fact: when I
pointed this out to the folks responsible for the page, I
was—rather snootily—informed that they had "vetted" the
quotation. Actually, they had discovered the (common) misquotation.
And rather than check again, they decided to leave it in place,
blissfully confident in their slipshod "vetting".

Oh well, at least it's not as if they carved it in stone.
Ironically, the "Drum Major" sermon was the source for a
different misquotation. And this one really was
carved in stone. When the MLK memorial in Washington DC
was unveiled in 2011, it was engraved with:

I WAS A DRUM MAJOR FOR JUSTICE PEACE AND RIGHTEOUSNESS

… which, whatever its truthiness, are not words that
MLK actually uttered, and arguably have a totally different
connotation than the actual words King spoke. Leaving out
the responses from the congregation:

If any of you are around when I have to meet my day, I don't want a
long funeral. And if you get somebody to deliver the eulogy, tell them
not to talk too long. And every now and then I wonder
what I want them to say. Tell them not to mention that I have a Nobel
Peace Prize--that isn't important. Tell them not to mention that I have
three or four hundred other awards--that's not important. Tell them not
to mention where I went to school.

I'd like somebody to mention that day that Martin Luther King, Jr.,
tried to give his life serving others.

I'd like for somebody to say that day that Martin Luther King, Jr.,
tried to love somebody.

I want you to say that day that I tried to be right on the war
question.

I want you to be able to say that day that I did try to feed the
hungry.

And I want you to be able to say that day that I did try in my life
to clothe those who were naked.

I want you to say on that day that I did try in my life to visit
those who were in prison.

I want you to say that I tried to love and serve humanity.

Yes, if you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a
drum major for justice. Say that I was a drum major for
peace. I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of
the other shallow things will not matter. I won't have
any money to leave behind. I won't have the fine and luxurious things of
life to leave behind. But I just want to leave a committed life behind.
And that's all I want to say.

It was recently announced that the misquote will be
obliterated from the memorial sometime in 2013, at a cost of $700-$900K.

Finally, it should be noted that King's 1968 "Drum Major" sermon is widely
recognized as being "adapted" from a 1949 sermon by J. Wallace
Hamilton. Um, without attribution. You can get an idea of the
extent of the "adaptation" via the Google Books view of Keith D.
Miller's Voice of Deliverance: The Language of Martin Luther King,
Jr., and Its Sources. Fans of MLK tend to dismiss/explain away
his plagiarism from other works, which is fine, but
it's a little ironic that UNH is choosing to draw attention to
behavior that would get a current-day student severely disciplined.

U is for Undertow

Why yes, I did read (or, in this case, mostly listen to) two Sue Grafton
mysteries in a row. Good catch. What are you anyway, the book police?
Anyway, I've gone from "trying to catch up with Ms. Grafton" to
"almost caught up with Ms. Grafton" in a very short time.

The book is set in Spring 1988, and Ms Grafton's
PI heroine, Kinsey Millhone, still has her hot Mustang.
A troubled young man appears on her doorstep: Michael Sutton
has been to the cops, and they have referred him to Kinsey. He tells
a vague yarn about the summer of 1967, when he wandered off into
the woods and came across two men burying something, acting mysterious.
And now, by coincidence, he's realized this was around the same time
a four-year-old girl was kidnapped. Could the men have been
burying… the child?

Sutton's story is too farfetched and flimsy for the police to
investigate, but he manages to scrape together
enough cash to hire Kinsey for one day.
Her masterful detective work gets him more than his money's worth.
Unfortunately (for Sutton), Kinsey's doggedness causes her to pursue the
investigation unpaid; while she eventually discovers the truth,
Sutton's fate is not so pleasant.

As she did in the past few books, Ms. Grafton intersperses Kinsey's
first-person narrative with third-person sections set both in 1966-67
and the "present" 1988. And (once again) these work pretty well.
There's a huge conflict between the bourgeois values of
upper-middle-class Santa Teresa and the nascent hippie movement.
Grafton is remarkably unsympathetic to the hippies.

A side plot involves Kinsey's relationship with her mostly-estranged
family. A secret about Aunt Gin, who brought Kinsey up after her
parents were killed, is revealed. And the ending is kind of sweet.

Darling Companion

The Christmas prep season is busier than Actual Christmas, it seems, but
we took a break to watch a movie. Not a good movie, but still.
It was written and directed by Lawrence Kasdan. This is the same
guy who wrote and directed Body Heat, Silverado,
and The Big Chill
back in the 1980s. He has screenplay credits for The Empire Strikes
Back and Raiders of the Lost Ark!
Dude, what happened here?

Fast forward a year or so, and Grace is getting married to the vet
in a beautiful Rocky Mountain setting.
And then Freeway runs away while on a walk with Joseph! Bad dog!
A dog hunt commences, not only by Beth and Joseph, but also including
various semi-colorful barely-interesting family and friends. (Including
Dianne Wiest, Richard Jenkins, Mark Duplass, and Sam Shepard).

The plot is just a clearly just a scaffold to explore the characters
and their relationships. See if you can get interested in them; I
couldn't.
The cast is filled with acting talent (I count five Oscars and five
additional nominations in the cast) but there's
not much acting talent can do to save a weak plot and wooden dialog.

The DVD box features a blurb by Pete Hammond of Deadline
Hollywood: "A True Gem". Looking at the source
of the quote, I can't see any evidence he watched the movie.

T is for Trespass

As noted on the main
blog, I've been going through a period of diminished vision. This
precluded long periods of reading, but I was able to borrow the Audible
version of this
Sue Grafton book and get it on my iPad.

This is my first time (at least as an adult)
"reading" a book by listening to someone
else
read it. In this case, the reader is the Tony-award winning
actress Judy Kaye, who's
performed all of Ms. Grafton's Kinsey Millhone novels for this medium.
A few notes:

If you doze off, a real book notices you've done so and stops. Not
the Audible version. Ms. Kaye, bless her, just reads on.

So, on numerous occasions, I woke up with a snort, and
had to—dammit—stop the
playback, and attempt to backtrack to the last-thing-I-remembered-hearing spot.

Worse: For all its technical sophistication, the default iPad
playback software doesn't make this very easy.

On this point, 21st-century
technology is outclassed by centuries-old technology.
Irony? Maybe. I can never tell.

Which brings up a related point.
Way back in my Usenet
days, I dubbed Ms. Grafton the "Queen of Pointless Description",
because—God bless her—she does like to have Kinsey go on
and on about her diet, clothes, environment, … For example,
while jogging through downtown Santa Teresa, she has to wait for
a freight train to pass. And…

I counted six boxcars, a tank car, an empty livestock car, refrigerator
car, nine container cars, three hard-top gondolas, a flat car, and
finally the caboose.

I've learned to put up with this yammering,
because I love Kinsey as much as I do
any fictional character. But (as I discovered) this brought up another
difference between print and audio: it's much easier to skim
through this stuff in print. There's no "fast-forward through unnecessary
content" button on the iPad. Which—guess what?—makes it
more likely that I'll find myself waking up from a snooze.

It's long, about 12.5 hours. Longer in my case,
due to the factors mentioned above.

Ms. Kaye does slightly different voices for each character.
After reading 19 dead-trees Kinsey books, with her first-person
narration, I was slightly surprised by Kinsey's "actual" voice here.
I'd always seen her with a slightly sweet, slightly goofy, occasionally
sarcastic voice. But in reality
(according to Ms. Kaye), she's a little hard-edged, tough, and more cynical
than sarcastic.

But what of the book itself? Ms. Grafton (as she did in S) breaks
up her usual first-person narrative. A number of chapters are
third-person narration following "Solana Rojas", the villain of the
piece. Except she's not really Solana; she's a sociopathic
identity thief, an expert at masquerading as different people as
she does her dirty work, then vanishing back into her normal persona.

Kinsey, for her part, is mostly engaged in her normal PI work of
serving legal papers, investigating insurance fraud, etc. But her
cranky old neighbor, Gus, has a nasty accident, requiring the
services of an in-home nurse. Guess who gets hired? Kinsey
is initially gulled, but her nagging doubts
become suspicions, then grow into a terrible certainty.
She uses her detective skills to peel back the deception, but Solana
always seems to be a couple steps ahead of her. And (of
course) Kinsey eventually finds herself in peril.

Seeking a Friend for the End of the World

It's a mini-boomlet in humanity-faces-Armageddon movies. But this is
much, much more fun to watch than Melancholia, even though it
lacks Kirsten Dunst's bazooms.

The culprit in this movie is "Matilda", an asteroid that's on track for an
inevitable collision with Earth. We're informed right at the start
that the usual Bruce
Willis/Robert Duvall mission to save the planet has failed, so what's
left
is to follow the odyssey of Dodge (Steve Carell) as he tries to
deal with his wife (literally) running out on him. (Nice touch:
Dodge's wife is played by Steve Carell's actual spouse, Nancy.)

The large-scale reactions to doomsday are as expected. Some engage in
violent
anarchy; some seek out hedonistic excess in various combinations
of sex, booze, and drugs; some plan for survival;
some wallow in the mellow fellowship of family and friends. But Dodge becomes
obsessed with reuniting with his high-school sweetheart, Olivia.
He pairs up with Penny (Keira Knightley), a ditzy weed-loving
free spirit. They set out in search of Olivia, but encounter a number
of colorful characters on the way.

It's unpretentious and (although not billed as a comedy)
very funny in spots. And mawkishly sentimental in
other spots. But overall, very watchable. It probably helps that Steve
Carell is an expert in portraying sympathetic characters; in less
capable hands, Dodge would come across as a whiny, effete loser.

The Robots of Dawn

This 1983 book is another "late Asimov" novel, a followup to his
two robot/mystery books written in the 1950s.
Asimov's detective is Elijah "Lije" Baley, who's once again partnered
with R. Daneel Olivaw. Where the "R" stands for Robot; Daneel is the only
robot in the galaxy that can reasonably pass for human.

Or, specifically, he is now the only humanoid robot. Because the
positronic brain of
the only other humanoid robot, R. Jander Panell, has been sent into
an irreversible lockup. The prime suspect is Daneel's and Jander's
creator, Dr. Han Fastolfe; even he, with a characteristic lack of
modesty, admits that he's the only one with the requisite skills and
knowledge to "kill" a robot in this manner. Yet he denies that he's the
culprit.

Baley is sent to the scene of the crime: Aurora, the first planet to be
colonized by Earth. By a convoluted (and not too convincing) argument,
the very future of mankind depends on the outcome of Baley's
investigation: unless Fastolfe is cleared, his political enemies
will gain the upper hand. And his political enemies believe that
Earth must never be allowed to participate in futher settlement of
the galaxy's inhabited worlds.

Things are somewhat enlivened by the confession of Gladia (a reappearing
character from the previous book in the series), for whom Jander was
working. It turns out
that
she and Jander had been canoodling in secrecy; that sordid revelation
would probably not have made it into a 1950s Asimov novel.

But otherwise—as usual with an Asimov novel—it's talk, talk,
talk. Page after page of wooden dialog.
It takes until page 319 (in my 408-page copy) before something
resembling normal mystery action occurs. Asimov makes up for this
with his fantastic world-building and plotting skills.

This book also continues Asimov's project of tying together his
Foundation series with his robot series, with Fastolfe working
on something he calls "psychohistory"—a key element in the
Foundation books—and tantalizing hints about the upcoming
Galactic Empire (where, as we know, the Terran origins of humanity
have been forgotten).

I Can See Clearly Now

Not that it matters, but my extended blogging break has been mostly
for medical reasons. A couple weeks back I noticed that something
funny was going on with the vision in my right eye. It appeared
a black blob was creeping up from the bottom of my vision field.
I could still see OK out of the top two-thirds, but as the Apple
guys say: "That's not recommended."

I had a previously-scheduled optometrist appointment. The nice
lady took one look and told me what I kind of expected: I had
a detached retina.

Instead of getting one of those stylish glass eyes, like Peter Falk,
I was encouraged to get a vitrectomy, the
removal of the eye's vitreous humor. (Schematic at right. Follow the
link for even more disturbing pictures of the procedure.)
Some fancy laser work pasted
the retina back in place, and—this is kind of the cool
part—my eye was inflated slightly with a gas bubble to hold the
retina in place while things healed up, hopefully for the long term.

(I am wearing a green wristband to inform people that I can't fly, or
be given nitrous oxide, lest my eye explode. That voids the warranty.)

The problem is: you can't see anything with a gas bubble in your eye.
It does not have the same refractory index, so the lens can't do its
usual fine focusing job. Worse, you're supposed to keep the bubble
at the back of your eye, out of contact with the lens. It can cause
cataracts. So I've also needed to spend waking and sleeping hours
in a position with my eye pointing down.

This is even less interesting than it sounds. And sleeping is no picnic
when you can't assume your normal range of comfortable positions.

Fortunately, I've been able to borrow the Audible versions
of Sue Grafton novels for iPad
playback. She's much more sleep-inducing in this format!
Unlike reading a real book, the novel just keeps going while I doze off.
So I wake up, realize that I've missed an unknown number of
minutes/hours, and try to backtrack to the last thing I remember
hearing.

But things are getting better, and I hope to be getting back to normal
soon.

Ruby Sparks

IMDB bills this as "Comedy/Fantasy/Romance", the same small
genre intersection as (say) Midnight in Paris. But I liked
this a lot better.

Paul Dano plays Calvin Weir-Fields, a writer whose first novel was a
critical and commercial success, allowing him to live in a shiny house
with a great view and a pool. But he's struggling and failing to put words
to paper, and his life is lonely emptiness, enough to see a sympathetic
shrink (Elliot Gould).

Calvin is obsessed with a (literal) dream girl, Ruby. The shrink
gives Calvin his assignment: write about her. And—oops—this
is sufficient to make Ruby appear in real life. (At first, Calvin
takes Ruby for a delusion, and doubts that anyone else can see her.
This is hilariously debunked.)

All is bliss for a while. But things go wrong in an unexpected way: Ruby
is (again, literally) an unfinished character. Her reality is
limited by what Calvin has typed, and her incompleteness begins to
chafe.

Annette Bening and Antonio Banderas are very funny playing
Calvin's mom and stepdad.

One impressive bit: this seems to be a male fantasy, "obviously" written
by a guy. But no: the writer is Zoe Kazan, who also plays Ruby. (It's
in her genes: grandpa was Elia Kazan.)

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